


Blue Sky Country

by telm_393



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Human, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Disasters, Everyone Is Alive, Fire, Gen, Introspection, Natural Disasters, Team Cockroach, Weather, Wildfires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28637346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Team Cockroach, living in the Anthropocene after everything goes to shit.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: Bulletproof 20/21





	Blue Sky Country

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tentacledicks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/gifts).



> Okay, so, this 100% fulfills "apocalyptic scenario that hyperfocuses on the weather effects of the apocalyptic event." Like, a lot. A whole, whole lot. 
> 
> It also fulfills the tag "last remaining emotionally damaged survivors of war/apocalypse find comfort with each other."
> 
> The Anthropocene = The age where human activity is the most important factor when it comes to the climate.
> 
> Disclaimer: Please note that I play fast and loose here on roughly everything. If something seems inaccurate to you, it probably is. Hyperfocus on weather events or not, this is 90% disaster movie science--and I am NOT making predictions about climate change.

It’s finally gotten cold enough for Eleanor to notice, so she wraps a scarf around her neck. 

They might have to break out the space heater soon. They’re definitely not gonna need the fan anymore, because it has to be under freezing at this point, which is kind of funny. Considering that it was 105 degrees yesterday. There are two temperatures in Colorado: freezing, or really fucking hot.

It was 130 degrees in Phoenix, the day it caught on fire for the last time and she left, some randos from out of town in tow because it turned out she wasn’t a bad enough person to leave people she could save to burn, and she couldn’t remember the last time it had been freezing. 

+

The statue of John Wayne is on fire. Which makes sense, given that it’s made out of cigarette butts. Chidi thought it was a fire hazard from the beginning, actually, but didn’t mention it. He was in Australia until the bitter end, after all, unable to choose anywhere else to go, so he was used to the fire. 

But the thing about the statue of John Wayne is that it’s in front of the library, which is equally in flames, just like the airport, even though those are the only two evacuation sites that have withstood the past few years, which Chidi’s heard have been particularly bad, though every year seems to be particularly bad. 

There’s no such thing as _peculiarly_ bad anymore, Chidi’s found, not for almost anywhere. 

Chidi doesn’t have a car, though a car wouldn’t necessarily be much help in this situation, not somewhere with so many people wandering around. Everyone is on foot.

Chidi’s not stupid, which means his sweat-soaked jeans and sneakers and shirt are fire-retardant, but it’s not enough. 

He wants to squeeze his eyes shut and cover his ears against the screaming, against the people begging for help, but he can’t. 

Well, he does mostly close his eyes, but that’s because of the smoke. 

He spots a burnt-up N95 on the ground, and shudders.

There’s nothing but fire and abandoned cars. 

Chidi stumbles and nearly falls. He doesn’t know where to run.

 _Directional insanity,_ the doctors in Senegal called it, and Chidi always went with that. He has basically no flair for the dramatic, but he does like the sound of it better than a _proprioception disorder._

Whatever it is, it doesn’t help in all this smoke. 

After surviving Australia, he’s going to die here.

 _Go towards the water,_ he thinks, over and over again. _Go towards the water._

But there’s no water here. It’s all gone. Arizona gets it all from Colorado, and it’s only enough for the dwindling number of people holding out and living here to drink.

Chidi adjusts his N95, and he runs. He runs in any direction but towards the flames.

He’s good at running. His anxiety-exercising helps him now. 

He doesn’t know where he is anymore. Nothing looks like anything.

Now this—this is unprecedented, right? It must be.

He stumbles and falls. He’s on some kind of mattress, except the mattress is a body, and he screams behind his mask.

Should he have helped this person, whoever they are? Did he hear them scream? But if he helps, won’t he just die?

In the end, is Chidi selfish? 

His glasses are all fogged up. He curls up on the ground. Maybe he’s on some kind of trail. He wishes he had something to put over himself. 

He stirs. He thinks he sees the very faintest outlines of mountains, but he’s almost certain that he’s imagining things. The mountains haven’t been visible for days. 

There’s an engine revving.

Chidi looks. A truck. Charred, but somehow still running. There’s fire-retardant tarp over a bunch of stuff in the back. Someone was ready for this, he thinks. Or ready enough. To evacuate. But everyone’s ready to evacuate. At a certain point, it all comes down to sheer luck. 

“Yo,” someone calls out the window, voice muffled by some sort of mask. Chidi searches for the source of the voice, and sees only flyaway blonde hair peeking out behind a gas mask he could’ve sworn he saw in an exhibition at the university a few weeks ago, before this megafire shut everything down. “Hey! Hey, you!” the voice, a woman’s voice, calls. “Are you alive? Holy shit, man, are you alive?”

Alive. Unburnt. Somehow.

Is Chidi simply lucky?

He doesn’t understand. What has he done in his life to deserve good luck? 

He lifts his hand. The truck is idling.

“Get in! Get in, man! You have five minutes.”

Maybe Chidi should just stay here.

Only this isn’t the time, is it? To not be able to make decisions? 

This is not the time. 

Chidi gets up the last of his energy. He doesn’t feel the heat anymore; only determination. 

He stands. He stumbles. This is, he thinks, the last decision he will ever make. 

He does not scream when his skin burns on the metal of the car door, just wrenches it open with strength he didn’t know he had and piles in.

His head is on someone’s lap, he thinks. The fabric of a dress, a strange sartorial choice for wildfire country. The person doesn’t push him off. 

He looks up, and a woman with long black hair wearing an N95 under a cloth mask decorated with what he first thinks are rhinestones but turn out to be lab-made diamonds looks down at him wide-eyed. Then her expression becomes determined, and she looks back up.

Grimly, she tells the woman in the front—whose face is almost obscured by her gas mask and what Chidi thinks is an N95 with a respirator and who’s sitting next to a young guy in an N95 and, inexplicably, two cloth masks, one blue and one orange, the blue one hanging off his ear—“Floor it!” 

The truck lurches forward, and Chidi either passes out or goes to sleep.

(He can never decide which one.)

They go towards the mountains. 

What they find there makes Chidi suspect that he really does have good luck, or has met up with people who do, which, in the end, means he does just have good luck. 

Doesn’t it? 

+

Colorado’s weather is more unpredictable than Arizona’s is (was?), but at least parts of the state are kind of viable, unlike most of the west these days. Not that there’s much viable space in any direction. The south and the north and the midwest are also only kind of inhabitable, since things went to shit, and the state of Colorado isn’t at the top of the list of things helping them survive anyway. 

It’s probably the house; the fact Janet and Michael were smart enough to keep wildfires and floods and landslides and snowstorms and all that shit in mind when they built a house in the Rockies. 

They made sure it wasn’t at the end of some canyon or cliff that’d make fire chase after them faster than they could run or bury them after an avalanche, it’s on stilts, it’s made of fire retardant material and _no wood_ , it’s got a bunker and an attic way high up, there’s enough food that it seems like it’ll last forever but won’t if they ever get totally cut off from the closest town, and they cut down all the trees and got rid of all the dry vegetation around them for miles, and never slacked off on making sure it didn’t pile up. 

Because, Janet says, it was the most forward-thinking thing to do, as long as they took into account that the house was so isolated, in such a seemingly impractical place, that there was no way to get aid if they ever, finally, needed to be saved.

A few years ago, Eleanor would’ve said they were paranoid, but not anymore. More people should’ve been paranoid about this, because it’s not paranoia if someone’s really out to get you.

Even if that “someone” is Motherfucking Nature. 

And it’s not like Michael wasn’t just doing what the experts said anyone living in the urban-wildlife interface or whatever it’s called should. 

Other than “don’t do it” and “why the fuck would you build so far away” and “you’re gambling with your life” and all that. Obviously. But lately there are reasons to not build anywhere, and yet there are still people, if less than before, so. They build, and rebuild, and on and on and on, roll the dice because they still need a place to stay.

Fuck. Eleanor should’ve joined that environmental group instead of throwing away all the pamphlets. Then again, it’s not like it would’ve done any good, so why bother? All Eleanor could really have done was wait until something like this happened, even though she’s pretty sure no one thought it’d happen like this. 

The destruction of the world crept along for centuries, and then, suddenly, it accelerated so hard it was like Motherfucking Nature put her foot on the gas pedal (ha) and floored it. 

Eleanor would say no one really knows why it happened like that when she swears that even the science nerds of the world thought it’d take a few more decades at least, but she could’ve missed something. Because she didn’t read the pamphlets.

Fine. 

She read some of the pamphlets. 

They didn’t include that information.

It doesn’t matter anymore, the exact mechanics of the world they live in. What Eleanor’s doing now is staying alive and keeping the people she inexplicably cares about alive, because they’re her family, up to and including the fact that she didn’t choose to be with them.

(Her parents are dead. RIP or whatever.)

Eleanor looks out the window. It’s started to snow. She smears a hand across the fogged-up window, and it comes away red and cold. 

She takes a deep breath.

The snow, at least, should clear out the smoke for a while. 

+

Michael used to enjoy people-watching, even before he got out of the Bad Place, where all the demons (sorry, people) were the same for basically his entire life. It was how he came to terms with human beings, began seeing himself in them. Began seeing their beauty. 

It still took him sixty-five years to realize that he wasn’t in the Bad Place and neither were all the humans around him. Janet helped with that, of course, but the both of them have always had some natural curiosity, and Michael wouldn’t call them slow learners. Most of the others in the Bad Place, who are almost certainly all dead by now, never did figure that out. 

Michael’s always regretted that he didn’t truly flourish as an architect until buildings were constantly burning and flooding, but, to be fair, it did make his skills rather in demand. For a while. Designing and building houses that could, perhaps, withstand the whims of nature. Of course, nothing can actually withstand the whims of nature, but Michael does his best, and he was always building his own house, with Janet’s help and research. Naturally.

He chose to build a house (isolated, of course; Michael likes people, but doesn’t fit in with them, and he needs to be careful anyway, seeing as how he’s not actually dead and is quite invested in staying alive) near a town called “Good Place” because he thought it was kind of funny, kind of fitting. He wondered, idly, if anyone there knew that they were mirroring what he has to admit is a cult, and assumed they didn’t. Other people were always too stupid to notice its existence. 

It doesn’t matter much anymore, really. Michael had to come to terms with that when, as the news media said, things came to a head, and suddenly there weren’t so many people to watch. Michael and Janet were lucky that their house was complete by then, and lucky that they were there. He has no idea how they would’ve made it if they hadn’t been.

He still can’t quite figure out how the others, the singed and exhausted motley little mass of humanity, made it to the house. Sheer luck, Chidi says, though he always sounds upset by it, and Michael is old enough to believe in impossible things, so he accepts it. He accepts them.

He likes people-watching, and he has no choice but to like the others; Tahani with her cunning determination under the glitz and glamour, Chidi with his laser-pointed intelligence, Jason with his sweetness, and world-weary Eleanor, who’s willing to do anything to keep them all alive because there’s nothing else to do. 

Michael watches them, and he can’t help but love them, even though he didn’t have any more love to give. He barely had enough for Janet. Barely had enough for humanity overall, but there is no humanity overall anymore, so Michael has them. 

He’s happy about that, though it’s a pity that things shook out like this. That this was what it took for Michael to find the only group of people he’s ever truly loved. 

But so things go, on planet earth. 

So they go. 

+

Eleanor thinks they can get some water from the snow, but they should wait until the storm’s over. 

The storm hasn’t actually started yet—the snow’s still falling gently, clearing up the starry sky for a little while—but it will any second or minute or hour now, and none of them want to be caught outside when it does. You could get lost forever out there, in the white-out snow, and in the time it took Eleanor to think that, it started picking up. 

She can still see the flames in the distance, licking at the already-dead, pine-beetle-eaten trees. Eleanor’s heard that these mountains and everything in them were basically made for fire, that they were supposed to burn so everything would come back shiny and new, but she guesses they weren’t made for this endless wildfire season. 

At some point, too much of a good thing kills anything, and they stopped the controlled fires once they became impossible to control, every wildfire a megafire. Then the firefighters’ job became to mitigate loss of life and property, and then just to mitigate loss of life, because the time to prepare for wildfire season passed years ago.

Eleanor and the others cleared out the dry brush and debris just the other day, which is a shitty chore, but it’s better than the fire overtaking them, because if they’re not careful it’ll get them at some point, even somewhere the fire can’t barrel down a canyon. The house is high up enough that most of them felt sick at first, the elevation going to their heads and constricting their lungs.

It’s crazy how it still looks like they’re surrounded by mountains, purple and white and orange and red with the flames that lick up the sides and engulf the vegetation. 

Eleanor looks at the sky, which is more than a little hard to see, snowflakes and clouds turning it bright white. It’s late, she thinks. Everyone else is asleep, but Eleanor doesn’t sleep much. 

The other day, the sky was dark orange, and the sun was a huge red ball in the sky. The sunset was so weirdly beautiful that they went to the porch to look at it. They do that a lot. Eleanor used to hear her neighbors saying, _hey, at least the sunset’s gonna be beautiful_. 

They used to call the west blue sky country, which seems either hilarious or sad now, depending on the day and how drunk Eleanor is. 

Eleanor would say that she doesn’t remember the last time she saw a blue sky, but she’d be lying. It still peeks through every once in a while, depending on if something’s gone down to clear out the smoke for a bit. She has high hopes for the aftermath of this storm, when the snow is still blanketing the fire, protecting it while it burns under the powder, waiting to creep out again. The snowmelt should still put out some of the fire, though. She’s pretty sure.

Eleanor studies the sky, sometimes, watching for flashes of blue. She stands at the window when something happens that’ll give her the chance to see it again.

When something like snow happens. 

And it’s not as if she doesn’t remember the sky she saw every day, a long time ago...a few years ago. 

She should’ve looked at the sky more often. The blue, the stars at night—when there wasn’t too much pollution and even when there was, because the pollution didn’t change the color as much or as often as the weather, which has almost stolen that blue sky—but she never thought she’d have a reason to miss it. 

She’d heard people saying things about climate change and basically the end of the world, but she always thought she’d be dead by the time things went this far, and this would all be someone else’s problem. She underestimated how young she was. 

It’s dumping now, buckets of snowflakes whirling and winding together, tossed around by the wind. She can’t see the fire at this point, or anything past blinding white, and she pulls on some gloves. Eventually she’ll be all bundled up, and Tahani will definitely turn on the space heater once the cold wakes her up. 

Eleanor wonders when the storm will end, or if, somehow, this’ll be the time it doesn’t end at all. 

She wonders if this’ll be the time it’s too heavy even for this place, just like she wonders, every time the fire does rush over their house, leaving the edges singed but the place intact, that this is the time it’ll be too hot for them. 

Just like she wonders exactly how high the water would have to go for them to drown after all. 

The house shakes from the screaming wind. 

Someday, the windows they probably should permanently board up, never mind how strong the material they’ve built them out of is, will blow out. The door will come off its hinges. The weather will stream into this place and that’s where their story will end. 

Or maybe they finally won’t be able to take the days-long hike to the nearest town—which is, with a lot of forced cheer, called “The Good Place”—and they’ll starve, or the water will completely run out like it did in Arizona and Wyoming. 

They’ll stop being lucky at some point, because she’s pretty sure that Chidi’s right and it all comes down to luck more than anything. It’s luck that this house is still standing, luck that they found each other, luck that any of them are alive at all.

As Eleanor watches the snow, a surge of emotion in her throat makes her swallow. She’s afraid she’s going to cry. She doesn’t know why she thinks it’s so beautiful, the storm thrown back and forth by the wind. She guesses she’s looking forward to the moment that it slows down and she sees the aftermath, the fields of white sparkling in the pale sun, the frozen trees with their breaking, creaking branches. If they make it through this one.

She hopes that when she dies, which will, realistically, be pretty soon, she’ll be looking at the blue sky. 

She knows that that’s probably a stupid thing to hope, considering.

Eleanor stands at the window and waits, only half-paying attention when someone comes in.

“The house is shaking,” Jason says.

“It’s snowing,” Eleanor tells him, and Jason comes up to peer out the window.

“Oh, yeah,” he says brightly, and they watch the snow for a moment, together, in the minutes before anyone else comes down. Jason says, after a lot longer than Eleanor thought he’d go without speaking, “It’s pretty.”

His voice sounds soft and distant, and Eleanor nods.

“Sure, buddy. I guess you could say that.” 

_I think so too._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to within_a_dream for betaing! 
> 
> Also, when Eleanor refers to the urban-wildlife interface, she is actually referring to the wildland-urban interface. In the wildland-urban interface, there are structures and sometimes populated areas in places that are prone to wildfires due to the fact that the ecosystem naturally requires the vegetation there to burn to keep it healthy, causing a sort of push-pull between the ecosystem and the necessity of mitigating loss of life and property. 
> 
> Michael and Janet obviously built right in the interface, but at the point in time that the story takes place, a fair amount of the American West, particularly the Mountain West, would be there (in reality, a fair amount of the American West IS there), so there wasn't much they could do. Note that the way that they build the house isn't really actual wildland-urban interface mitigation as suggested by experts, especially since they didn't only consider wildfires when building the house. It's the fanfiction equivalent of a disaster movie writer going "sounds legit!!!" and writing on their merry way.


End file.
